Nikki Haley Joins List of Ex-Trump Officials to Private Sector

Boeing Co. nominated former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, to its board of directors on Tuesday. She joins Boeing on April 29, pending a shareholder vote at the company’s annual meeting. Haley was UN ambassador from January 2017 until the end of 2018. Before that, she was South Carolina’s first female governor from 2011 to 2017.

Haley joins four other Boeing board members with government experience spanning Democratic and Republican administrations including: Kenneth M. Duberstein (White House Chief of Staff in the Reagan administration); Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr. (Vice Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2005 to 2007); Caroline B. Kennedy (U.S. Ambassador to Japan in the Obama administration); and Susan C. Schwab (U.S. Trade Representative during the George W. Bush administration).

In her resignation letter to President Donald J. Trump, Haley wrote, “As a businessman, I expect you will appreciate my sense that returning from government to the private sector is not a step down but a step up.”

Other Trump administration officials who have taken the step up into the private sector include Dina Powell, former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy, now a partner at Goldman, Sachs & Co., as well as former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, who is currently chief communications officer at Fox Corp. Former National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster is now a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Other Trump alumni have taken the tried-and-true lobbying path (though not all have registered as lobbyists). Former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus is now president and chief strategist at Michael Best & Friedrich LLP, a law firm with a lobbying arm. Raj Shah, former White House Deputy Press Secretary, joined Ballard Partners in January as partner and chair, strategic communications. Everett Eissenstat, former Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, now leads global public policy at General Motors Co. as a senior vice president. Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke joined lobbying firm Turnberry Solutions as a senior advisor this month.